[viraptor]

Lots of people avoid GNU and go for licensing closer to bsd/mit if they want more freedom, or apache if they're worried about patents. There are also lots of companies avoiding gnu just in case it would theoretically force them to open-source something they want to keep private.

[andrekandre]

> Lots of people avoid GNU and go for licensing closer to bsd/mit if they want more freedom

is it fair today in this case that means freedom for the manufacturer/developer, not the user, which is the purpose of the gnu license?

[coldtea]

>is it fair today in this case that means freedom for the manufacturer/developer, not the user, which is the purpose of the gnu license?

Well, the people who care about licenses are mostly geeks on the developer side. So they would naturally care for the freedom of the developer too, not just the user.

From the user side, a benefit is that a rich company can use a library/tool etc in BSD/MIT and

1) make a proprietary product based on it

2) give back to the library/tool help maintain them

whereas many companies wouldn't touch the library/tool if it was GPL, as they couldn't create their own proprietary stuff on it.

This means

1) more software being made based on open source codebases (even if they are proprietary, more software being available is better for users than less),

2) more involvement by big companies to help grow/fix/add features to the FOSS version of the lib/tool (e.g. consider LLVM's growth),

[akerl_]

As a developer who prefers to use MIT/BSD-licensed codebases, my preference is because I want to license the code I’m writing as MIT/BSD, and I don’t want to expend mental effort figuring out if I’m using GPL dependencies, includes, etc in a way that impacts my ability to MIT/BSD my own code.

[viraptor]

"Fair" is a moral judgement there. You'll find people who agree and people who disagree.